Exult Forum

I just downloaded the latest source code and compiled without a hitch. The game runs fine except for the occasional ultra-long pause (approx. 20-30secs). I noticed that the stout (terminal output) usually shows something like:
'headless' is looking for a foe
or
'tentacles' is looking for a foe

Usually these are the times when it pauses. Is anyone else running into this problem?

The release is 1.00

I see slight pauses (< 1 sec) in situations like that, but they pretty much go away if I switch to a less CPU-intensive scaler. If you want to submit one of your savegames (with a description of how to get it to pause) in a bug report, I'll take a look. If I can duplicate it, I'll be able to fix it (but if not...).

It is happening anywhere an enemy is near. It happens conituously when I am near the Lord British Castle because of all the tentacles that appear.

I also notice that the CPU cycles peak out to 100% during a long duration of the game. Even when the graphics are set to the lowest quality (point).

I see alot of the output in the terminal regarding "Usecode ### not found" where ### is typically 509 and 517.


Here is a brief set of system specs.
Athlon XP 1800
SB Live!
512MB DDR (registered)
Mandrake 9.0 Distro using SDL 1.2
Running Exult in the KDE 3.0 enviornment.
XFree86 with Nvidia drivers on a Geforce 2mx DH with dual displays active.

Any idea what 'Usecode 509' and "Usecode 517" are for? I would think that they are the culprit since they come up just as often as the freeze does.

I narrowed it down.

It seems to be the FM music. I tried different settings. Nothing fixed the problem until I turned of the music altogether. Is it using Timidity to play them anyway? If so, then that explains it. Timidity has some sort of runaway process taking of my CPU cycles. I haven't checked on any updates because I never use Timidity.
I'll take a look into it. But for now... I can play!

You mean the MIDI-music.
you might want to check out the 1.1 tree as it features fm-music or ogg-music (that one is hefty download but worth it IMO)

Yes I meant Midi music. Sorry.
After figuring out the midi problem I did persue the CVS source code and also downloaded the Ogg files. Funny thing is, the CVS source fixed the midi problem. But I do like the Ogg method better so I can replace them with my own selection of music.

Thanks for all the help!

great that it works out for you now. the reason it seems fixed with the 1.1 source must be the dependancy on sdl_mixer

Pauses with forked_player in current CVS should be fixed now.

The problem was that when the player didn't start properly for a repeating song, it kept trying to start the player.